“The Sweet Songstress of Zion”

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Joseph Smith referred to which sister as the sweet songstress of Zion?

a.                  Emma Smith

b.                  Elizabeth Whitney

c.                   Patty Sessions

d.                  Eliza R. Snow

Yesterday’s answer:

B   Judge between right and wrong

Referring to the September 1851 “runaway” of four government territorial officers assigned to Utah Territory:   The officers’ revulsion for Utah often came down to their uneasiness about Brigham Young, and the Three Letters [Written by Thomas Kane and Jedediah Grant] had a long passage about him. It was one of the best short sketches written in the nineteenth century about the Mormon leader, although some of Kane’s phrases and Grant’s arguments were florid and overstated.  While Young had a “wonderful talent for business and hundred horse power for industry,” he lacked what many men might call intellectual “Cleverness or Quickness.” Nevertheless, “Brigham naturally can judge between right and wrong quicker than any mortal I ever saw,” Grant said, and had rich “spiritual endowments.” He “is nice in person, and must have everything ‘just so’ about him; his pride, moreover, is in his affectionate and joyous temper, and a humanity that makes the dogs and cattle know him to love him.” He “can’t smile and stab in the same wink, as they learn to do in Washington.” He is “the article [that] sells out West,” with “manners and [speaking] customs growing up in our Basin.” He has the ability to “Mix up devotion and drollery, eloquence and old English, quaintness and magnanimity, with a variety that only the most highly educated order of perception can fully appreciate.” How then could the officers have misunderstood him, Grant wondered?

Ronald W. Walker and Matthew J. Grow, The People Are “Hogafeed or Humbugged”: The 1851-52 National Reaction to Utah’s “Runaway” Officers, Journal of Mormon History, Fall 2014, 36-37.